Something funny im noticing about software thats supposed to be "user friendly"

[sandyd]

Ive been noticing this more and more again with software thats supposed to be more "user friendly" with each release. They begin to hide stuff that the consumer actually may need, and will have difficulty finding. In effect, the application becomes "too user friendly" for its own good.

<rant>
I recently got a new 1080p monitor on sale.
Going with the advice of my friends and the advice I recieved here, I went out and got a HDMI cable from a local computer store.

Try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. There remained a constant black border around the desktop on my HD monitor.

3h later, I found that there was an extremely simple slider that I could use to adjust overscan and underscan in the catalyst control panel.

And it was very well hidden.

FAIL.</rant>
This is the opposite of user friendly.
It would have been nice for catalyst control center to at least show a pop up to say that I might need to adjust the overscan/underscan settings if my monitor wasn't going full screen...

[Dustin2128]

Ive been noticing this more and more again with software thats supposed to be more "user friendly" with each release. They begin to hide stuff that the consumer actually may need, and will have difficulty finding. In effect, the application becomes "too user friendly" for its own good.

<rant>
I recently got a new 1080p monitor on sale.
Going with the advice of my friends and the advice I recieved here, I went out and got a HDMI cable from a local computer store.

Try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. There remained a constant black border around the desktop on my HD monitor.

3h later, I found that there was an extremely simple slider that I could use to adjust overscan and underscan in the catalyst control panel.

And it was very well hidden.

FAIL.</rant>

It would have been nice for catalyst control center to at least show a pop up to say that I might need to adjust the overscan/underscan settings if my monitor wasn't going full screen...
I'd have to agree, but that is unfortunately not the attitude in the software 'industry' at present.http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/60000/1000/700/61743/61743.strip.gif
And you actually bought an HDMI cable? :?

[sandyd]

I'd have to agree, but that is unfortunately not the attitude in the software 'industry' at present.http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/60000/1000/700/61743/61743.strip.gif
And you actually bought an HDMI cable? :?
yeah, the VGA cable was the one from my sister's computer :D
so I had to either get a VGA cable or a HDMI.

[Legendary_Bibo]

I'd have to agree, but that is unfortunately not the attitude in the software 'industry' at present.http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/60000/1000/700/61743/61743.strip.gif
And you actually bought an HDMI cable? :?

I've literally seen 3ft HDMI cables sold for a dime. At most you only have to pay like $5 so it's not really a huge expense. :rolleyes:

[Austin25]

I know!
At least there's the command line still.

[Dustin2128]

yeah, the VGA cable was the one from my sister's computer :D
so I had to either get a VGA cable or a HDMI.
what about DVI?

[NMFTM]

Ive been noticing this more and more again with software thats supposed to be more "user friendly" with each release. They begin to hide stuff that the consumer actually may need, and will have difficulty finding. In effect, the application becomes "too user friendly" for its own good.
Google Chrome/Chromium is a good example of this, they take out the menu bar.

[Madspyman]

I know!
At least there's the command line still.

Agreed, however not everyone feels the same way.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/70885.html?wlc=1285267199&wlc=1285533388

[Mr. Picklesworth]

Google Chrome/Chromium is a good example of this, they take out the menu bar.

To the contrary, I would put Chromium as an example of user friendly simplification done right. They didn't take out the menu bar; Chromium never had a “standard” menu bar. (Like the File, Edit, View, Tools and Help headers you see, regardless of what an application does or if it even has a help system).

Instead, they gave it the controls that suit it as a web browser. Nothing is hidden; it's just presented in a specific fashion. Really, things are less hidden because they aren't crammed into weird places just for the sake of having standard menu headers. The old arrangement was the best example: they logically broke it Application and Page categories. Simple. Fits every case in the context of a web browser. Every option in Chromium is available, logically, from its menu.

Unfortunately, lots of other browsers were inspired by that but completely missed the point. IE already had since IE7, so I won't mention it (even though IE9 does the same). Firefox and Opera both have single menus that list small subsets of their options. In both, the old menubar is simply hidden, so you often need to get it back by going through the unified menu first or by pressing Alt.
Now that is user-friendly done wrong.

[fatality_uk]

Ive been noticing this more and more again with software thats supposed to be more "user friendly" with each release. They begin to hide stuff that the consumer actually may need, and will have difficulty finding. In effect, the application becomes "too user friendly" for its own good.

<rant>
I recently got a new 1080p monitor on sale.
Going with the advice of my friends and the advice I recieved here, I went out and got a HDMI cable from a local computer store.

Try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. There remained a constant black border around the desktop on my HD monitor.

3h later, I found that there was an extremely simple slider that I could use to adjust overscan and underscan in the catalyst control panel.

And it was very well hidden.

FAIL.</rant>
This is the opposite of user friendly.
It would have been nice for catalyst control center to at least show a pop up to say that I might need to adjust the overscan/underscan settings if my monitor wasn't going full screen...

Which THEY are we talking about?


3h later, I found that there was an extremely simple slider that I could use to adjust overscan and underscan in the catalyst control panel.


The Catalyst Control Centre is obviously nothing to do with Canonical/Ubuntu.

[perspectoff]

There's a cartoon I once saw for which I've been looking for all of the past year. Has anyone seen it?

There's a soda machine in the break room of a call center, and all the call center reps are standing around the soda machine, giving advice to someone who lost their quarter in the machine:

"The soda always comes out the slot at the bottom."

"It always works fine for me!"

"Did you read the manual?"

"Try turning it off then turning it back on."

"Let's try calling technical support."

"Maybe it's time for an updated model."

"Well, you have to make sure you use a quarter that is between 3 grams and 5 grams, and it ought to be the type with ridges. You must always put it in face up, and never rotate it as it is pushed in the slot. That's your problem to begin with."

[msrinath80]

Ive been noticing this more and more again with software thats supposed to be more "user friendly" with each release. They begin to hide stuff that the consumer actually may need, and will have difficulty finding. In effect, the application becomes "too user friendly" for its own good.

<rant>
I recently got a new 1080p monitor on sale.
Going with the advice of my friends and the advice I recieved here, I went out and got a HDMI cable from a local computer store.

Try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. There remained a constant black border around the desktop on my HD monitor.

3h later, I found that there was an extremely simple slider that I could use to adjust overscan and underscan in the catalyst control panel.

And it was very well hidden.

FAIL.</rant>
This is the opposite of user friendly.
It would have been nice for catalyst control center to at least show a pop up to say that I might need to adjust the overscan/underscan settings if my monitor wasn't going full screen...

Unfortunate perhaps, but very true. There are many who treat computers as a means to some end, and for their benefit, and for the benefit of those who have just started using them as means to an end, the user interface is increasingly being re-designed to be overly simplistic. Not that there is anything wrong with this approach... but a direct side-effect of doing so is making it harder for those already accustomed to using a given program in a certain way. But then the argument is that since you are already adept enough to understand the underlying framework of said program, you should have no trouble digging deeper if necessary to find whatever it is you are looking for!

My personal perspective (and I repeat, that this is just MY personal view) is that one should always try and maintain as much independence as possible in practically all aspects of life. If you use a computer, try and understand what makes it tick (that includes both hardware and software). If you drive a car, make an effort to understand the basics of an automobile. You must certainly be in a position to change tires, check brake fluid levels by yourself, perform routine maintenance etc. If you water/maintain a garden, have some knowledge about basic gardening/plant life etc.

With the rapid proliferation of technology and some rudimentary level of evolution, humans have increasingly become lazy (read: specialized). Back in the stone age, one guy was the engineer, he was the doctor, he was the artist, he was the farmer, he was the priest etc. Granted, he was not a specialist in any one field, but circumstances forced him to learn a little bit of everything. Basically, in a certain sense, he was "complete". He could quickly adapt to changes, he could relate to just about everything. Today we cannot imagine a person of such qualities. From the looks of what is going on in the world today, it is impossible to say with certainty whether such specialization is indeed natural and beneficial. I wonder if anyone can shed more light on this :)

[sandyd]

what about DVI?
Apparently, the DVI output on my cards don't work... Still investigating this.

[sandyd]

Which THEY are we talking about?



The Catalyst Control Centre is obviously nothing to do with Canonical/Ubuntu.
im using the catalyst control center as an example

[NMFTM]

To the contrary, I would put Chromium as an example of user friendly simplification done right...Instead, they gave it the controls that suit it as a web browser. Nothing is hidden; it's just presented in a specific fashion.
It might be true that I'd fine Chrome's interface to be more intuitive than Firefox's if only I gave it some time. But, they're going against the standard interface that almost every GUI today uses. Just like what Microsoft did with their ribbon interface. If everyone just decided to do whatever they wanted without respect for the standards that have been laid in place for about the last 20 years it would be complete bedlam.

Sometimes it's better to go along with what everyone else is doing, even if it's not the best way of doing things for the sake of the greater good.

[3rdalbum]

I usually hate button menus, but Chrome's is the first one that I have seen done right.

Video transcoding software on Linux is either too simple or too complicated. It either just let's you do device presents (ipod, phones, PSP etc) or provides so much control that you can put a Theora video track into an AVI container, which is completely unplayable (and the software doesn't even give you a warning that this will not work)

[23meg]

But, they're going against the standard interface that almost every GUI today uses. Just like what Microsoft did with their ribbon interface. If everyone just decided to do whatever they wanted without respect for the standards that have been laid in place for about the last 20 years it would be complete bedlam.

Sometimes it's better to go along with what everyone else is doing, even if it's not the best way of doing things for the sake of the greater good.

Sometimes, right, but not always. For this particular example, Chrome should be congratulated for the bold move of getting rid of the menu bar.

The notion that graphical web browsers should have menu bars at all was inherited from word processors. The prevalent thinking at the inception of the WWW was that it would be read-write; people would be creating content as much as consuming it, and would be doing so in their web browsers, so the design had to be a sophisticated one that could accommodate both activities. The obvious place to look for inspiration was word processors.

As nice as that would have been, things didn't work that way. For the Mosaic-using academic and expert, it could have, but the web saw broad appeal at short notice, and the ratio of content creators to consumers turned out to be extremely low. It took more than twenty years for the web using population at large to begin to participate in the "writable web", thanks to the popularity of blogs, social networking services and decline in infrastructure costs.

All along those years, web browsers with a handful of features, which most people still only used a subset of, carried the unnecessary baggage that was the menu bar.

Chrome's bold move to start without a menu might have encouraged other browser makers to finally do what should have been done fifteen years ago; check out the latest designs for Firefox 4 and IE 9 on Windows.

[msrinath80]

But I thought the removal of the menu bar was an attempt to compensate for the ever-shrinking vertical space on todays laptops...

[23meg]

But I thought the removal of the menu bar was an attempt to compensate for the ever-shrinking vertical space on todays laptops...

It does have to do with that as well; few design decisions with such high impact are driven by one single factor. It's a matter of zeitgeist, really: Chrome launched at a time when it was finally understood that web browsers didn't have to expose lots of features by default, when it was finally understood that most people didn't need huge laptops and could do just fine with smaller, less powerful portables (netbooks) and the fruits of that understanding became manufacturable, when it was finally understood that search engines were the web for most people and building a fast browser around search as opposed to underutilized browser-specific features would be profitable, and the economics dictated by display manufacturers favored more horizontal space than vertical space.

In hindsight, it all sounds so obvious, but in practice, it still requires bold leaps to change the game in such a cumbersome field.

[smellyman]

of course there is always f11 on the keyboard and keeping the menus.....

[earthpigg]

i liked the 'good old days', when there was the default 'user-friendly' interface... and a nice little 'advanced' button.

[Khakilang]

To me anything that is not CLI is user friendly. Just have to find the right item to click. My memory is not that good in memorizing those commands.

[robsoles]

I became used to the fact that in any update of any software the makers of the software could shift anything I had become reliant on and I would just have to find it and hope it did something along the lines of what it did before, if I took the update.

MS shifted item after item of security importance in my OS (most) update(s) after update. I got tired of that, nowadays I run a VM of XPspII (less and less, when needed) on a Linux host and put up with the shifts and changes stuff goes through from updates in Ubuntu instead - at least you can usually find a note about it (or a forewarning even) when something serious shifts!

Pity, apparently shifting vital controls is part of what makes it all better. I'm not sure how this is so if the controls become more obscure and/or less intuitive.

[ubunterooster]

Google Chrome/Chromium is a good example of this, they take out the menu bar.
I wouldn't use the menu bar as an example but would say that Chrome is user friendly to end users but not to power users.

The question is "user friendly to whom?" as we all have different needs in "user friendliness"

[helwitch]

I am totally with you. A couple years ago in kubuntu, it used to be that you had access to ALL the graphical admin apps from kcontrol. Now, kcontrol is now more, and the "settings" app hides the really useful admin apps. OpenSuse has Yast2, that puts EVERYTHING an advanced user would want in one place. I've been saying for a long time, it's great to go user friendly and make it so that all the common stuff is in one place, but when you hide or remove the more advanced stuff, that's NOT user friendly, that's idiot proofing. Don't take away power user functionality just to try and protect newbies!

[t0p]

What happened to instruction manuals? When I was a young 'un, anything remotely technical came with printed instructions. Nowadays you're lucky if the item in question comes with a label telling you what it is!

I know that it's all about saving resources (paper, packaging, etc) and manufacturers often provide online documentation. But if the item in question is, say, a computer, how are you supposed to get online to access the docs?

And unfortunately, Free software is often not documented any more than an impenetrable man page. Programmers like coding, not writing documentation. This is an area in which users can help. If you have figured out how to use a poorly documented app, you can have a stab at writing a guide. But I don't think I should have to write a manual for the TV I've just bought.

[NMFTM]

I know that it's all about saving resources (paper, packaging, etc) and manufacturers often provide online documentation. But if the item in question is, say, a computer, how are you supposed to get online to access the docs?
A few months ago I was in the middle of a Visual Basic coarse at my college and after I got home from school I noticed that the Internet was down. So, I figured that would be a great opportunity to do some coding for projects I was supposed to be working on since I wouldn't be able to be distracted with the Internet. I wanted to look something up, so I went to the Help menu button. Apparently, the "built in" help manuals were only a pointer to Microsoft's MSDN website. So, I really couldn't do anything and ended up just playing a game instead.

And unfortunately, Free software is often not documented any more than an impenetrable man page. Programmers like coding, not writing documentation. This is an area in which users can help. If you have figured out how to use a poorly documented app, you can have a stab at writing a guide. But I don't think I should have to write a manual for the TV I've just bought.
Yes, but I'd say the same about much proprietary software as well. In school we learned the basics of both PHP and Visual Basic. PHP's online documentation (www.php.net (http://www.php.net)) was phenomenal. It was crisp, clear, and easy to understand. Microsoft's Visual Basic documentation by contrast was so often so complicated I often ended up just trying (and, usually failing) to get things to work by trial and error. I actually think that Microsoft delibarately makes their MSDN site hard to understand just so that you'll sign up for paid support.

I've also noticed that when you cross the realm of desktop applications to server applications, and assemblage of easy to use help goes right out the window. If I want to look up how to do something on Windows XP I can usually Google the correct guide in a matter of minutes if I know what I'm looking for. But in my current Windows Server 2008 class I'll scour the entire Internet and after what feels like an eternity of looking, will maybe find something that vaguely resembles what I need to do, and the stuff I'm trying to do isn't exactly anything high end. But, even if I do find a guide it'll usually either be extremely vague (not providing any step by step style instructions, or any assemblage of anything close to that) or will provide step by step instructions, but leave out a whole bunch of steps that it just assumes you already know.

Either that, or maybe I'm just a newb.

[jurialmunkey]

And unfortunately, Free software is often not documented any more than an impenetrable man page. Programmers like coding, not writing documentation. This is an area in which users can help. If you have figured out how to use a poorly documented app, you can have a stab at writing a guide. But I don't think I should have to write a manual for the TV I've just bought.

I like good manuals too. However, here is where your analogy fails: "for the tv I've just BOUGHT". If someone gave you a TV for free, would you expect it to have a manual??

[NMFTM]

I like good manuals too. However, here is where your analogy fails: "for the tv I've just BOUGHT". If someone gave you a TV for free, would you expect it to have a manual??
I think this is where open source could stand to make a lot of money. Instead of selling software, they should focus more on trying to get people to buy manuals and promote them more. So, instead of going to GIMP's website and just providing a free download link. They could have a link that took you to a site where they supplied a copy of a GIMP manual that happened to include a CD with the latest GIMP binaries compiled for various OS's.

Yes, open source documentation does exist and is plentiful. But I don't really see them trying to promote it as a revenue stream.

[Austin25]

Agreed, however not everyone feels the same way.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/70885.html?wlc=1285267199&wlc=1285533388
If they do that, I will dump Ubuntu for some other Linux. Maybe customize my own. Well, I'll bet if they get rid of terminal, they won't remove virtual tty's.

[boublik]

I think they're trying to mess with people's brains, and make their own machines/software look smarter while in fact they're killing every bit of mathematical logic an intuition the user developed over the years in for those machines. The people that have always done it that way is Apple and therefore you needn't change and have your intuition insulted with every "update".

[t0p]

If they do that, I will dump Ubuntu for some other Linux. Maybe customize my own. Well, I'll bet if they get rid of terminal, they won't remove virtual tty's.

I don't know who that "hairyfeet" guy is, but he strikes me as being trollish. Just look at this comment:



"Just pretend you are the average PC non-tech user for a while -- you'll quickly find that without CLI access, Linux quickly becomes about as useful as Windows ME," he predicted. "How sad that an OS with such a solid foundation should be crippled by such a fundamental weakness as lack of a decent UI, especially for fixing problems."
Anyone who knows Linux will know that most (if not all) tasks can be carried out through a GUI. People give advice in the form of CLI input because it's easier to tell someone to copy and paste a line of code rather than go through a "click-this-click-that" guide with screenshots and the rest of it.

Anyway, even if a distro decided to drop the terminal in a default install, the user could still install a virtual terminal for himself. The idea of dropping the Ctrl-Alt-Fn would be a terrible idea though. I haven't actually needed to use the ttys for ages, but it's nice to know the functionality is there. I mean, what are you supposed to do if X fails to work, if the CLI has gone? As hairyfeet himself acknowledges, Windows and Mac OSX both still have a CLI. Most users will never need to use it, but it's there because some users do need it. And, believe it or not, some of us like the command line. I like to use wget to download stuff, and I do so frequently. And there are other command-line utilities I use in preference to their GUI equivalents, like cfs. Should my option to use these programs be withdrawn just because some other people don't want to use them?